Tuesday, June 11, 2013

RANDOM THOUGHTS #144

Steve Cole reports on OPERATION FETCH:

For
the last two years, we've been planning for the time when Jean moves to
Amarillo and takes up a full-time desk in the office. Due to some
tedious circumstances involving an ex-boyfriend who did not want her to
move, the operation took on aspects of a secret military mission. This
ex-boyfriend as been very-very-ex for several years but refused to take
his changed status seriously. He still thought that he was a part of her
life and could tell her what to do and when to do it. A big part of the
plan was to avoid disabusing him of this notion and avoid him
realizing what was going on. (When we did Captain's Log #46 which had an
article about Jean's full-time duties in Amarillo, we sent him a copy
in which that one page was replaced by an article explaining why she had
decided to stay in North Carolina.) To be fair to the ex-boyfriend, we don't know if he would have become
violent or caused trouble of some sort, but there is no "undo key" for
life and no matter how slight the chance of something bad happening,
finding out that there was going to be something bad was too great a
risk.

1. We had to load up her
stuff in one day (while the ex-boyfriend was at work) and get out of
town before he realized she was leaving the state. That meant she could
not use a normal moving company (which just would not schedule things
that way), but had to rent a truck and do it herself. That obviously
required help, and in the end, there was only one solution: Steve P and
Steve C had to be there to supervise the loading and drive the truck
back to Texas while she followed in her car. Even worse, things had to
be "packed" into boxes before they could be "loaded" into the truck.
That took more time and caused a lot of confusion.

2. Getting
ready for the move took Jean over a year. Like all Americans, she has
spent a lifetime accumulating stuff and moving meant leaving half of it
behind. That involved a combination of selling stuff, giving stuff
away, and planning to just abandon other things. The whole point was to
get the stuff in her house down to an amount we could pack and load in a
few hours. She rented a storage building and began moving to it things
she wanted to take with her, but which she would not need (or at least
could do without) while in North Carolina. (For example, her winter
clothes went to storage in late March.) We could then load the storage
building stuff the previous day.

3. The plan was, like all
military plans, written backwards from the point of the main move, that
being the moment late on a Thursday afternoon that she left North
Carolina for good. (It had to be Thursday because if we left on Friday,
there was a risk that the ex-boyfriend might chase her down the highway.
As he had to go to work on Friday, leaving Thursday night pinned him in
place.) So it was decided that on Thursday we would load everything in
the house and on Wednesday we would load everything she had in storage
(something he would not notice due to a pre-scheduled maskirovka
operations). The original plan was that we'd spend Tuesday inventorying
what had to move and planning how to get it all done. Over time,
however, the sheer volume of stuff to be moved meant we had to do the
survey on Monday so that we'd have Tuesday to deal with anything the
pre-written plan could not handle (such as renting a second truck, or a
trailer). That meant Steve and Steve had to secretly reach North
Carolina on Sunday night. As the drive was over 24 hours of rolling
time, that meant two very hard days of driving and no margin for error.
In the end, Steve and Steve decided to leave Amarillo at noon on
Friday, which would in theory get us to the target at noon on Sunday. If
everything went well for the first 80% of the drive, we'd take a few
hours to see some Revolutionary War battlefields that were conveniently
next to the highway and still get there by dark. That actually worked
out quite well.

4. Jean rounded up a couple of SFU friends and
some local non-SFU friends to help load. This was good (we had labor on
site when we needed it) but was also bad (the crew was not a unit but a
gang of individuals, none of whom took orders from anyone else and all
of whom more or less loaded whatever looked like it needed loading). A
detailed plan written ahead of time collapsed because Steve C had a
broken leg (he spent all but one hour in a chair, packing stuff into
boxes) and Steve P (who had blown out his knee) spent his time
sitting down sorting things to be packed. All of that meant that some
minor items were accidentally left behind and some things that should
not have gone got loaded (both being subject to tedious prisoner
exchange negotiations).

5. The plan for the drive home involved
three people, Jean's car, and the big truck. The theory was to rotate
drivers (Steve Cole taking every third shift in each vehicle). As it
worked out, Steve C simply could not handle the big fully loaded
truck, leaving Steve P to drive the entire route by himself. Jean
would not allow anyone else to drive her car. This required heroic
12-hour days of driving, far beyond what anyone should be asked to do.
(Steve C got demoted to being Jean's radio operator and in-flight
stewardess. He was bored out of his mind.) The other choice would have
been to stop for long breaks and take an extra day to get home. It's
arguable that we should have taken the extra day in the name of safety.

6. We debated endlessly whether we should have done the operation in
July. It would have been hotter, but we would have been over the
injuries and would not have had the Origins pressure. That said,
however, Jean's personal safety and psychological health was the top
priority. The ex-boyfriend had announced plans that would have reduced
Jean to a virtual slave. Jean had, by February, fixated on the idea that
"May 2nd and I'm out of here!" and it would have crushed her to be told
to wait two more months.

7. Leanna played a key role in the
mission, even though she stayed home. She had to keep the office open,
but she also had to get Jean's apartment rented and get the stuff Jean
had sent ahead moved over there. Leanna had the guest room in her house
ready for Jean and graciously invited Jean to stay over two weeks while
getting her apartment (into which the over-full truck was emptied all
too hastily) in livable condition.

8. There was one "Seinfeld
moment" in the operation. Jean assumed that Steve C (who packed most of
the boxes) knew to label each box as to what was in it (or at least what
room it came out of). Steve C (me), having received no instructions to
label the boxes, did not do so. This meant that Jean had over two
hundred boxes stacked randomly in her new apartment without any idea
what was in each one. Worst of all, the bolts that held her
(disassembled) bed together were in a plastic kitchen container inside
an unmarked box inside another unmarked box. While Steve C remembered what the box looked like,
nobody had told Jean or Steve C that the box in question had been placed
inside another much larger box. So, after Jean futilely opened every
box of the type described without finding the bolts (and resigned
herself to sleeping on the floor) she accidentally found the bolts in a
random box she opened two weeks after moving.

9. During the drive
to Texas, we kept the vehicles in contact by using the two-way radios
we bought for Origins years ago. Yes, it seems silly to use radios when
cell phones have been invented, but it can be tricky to dial and answer a
cell phone while driving a very large truck, and the radios meant that
the people in the car could talk to the guy in the truck without such
bother. This was critically important during the one hour when Steve C
drove the truck, as he couldn't see out of it very well and didn't
realize that he was driving with the right side tires on the shoulder.
Jean was horrified to find that she had been assigned the radio call
sign "Swamp Rat" but then decided that she really did like it.

10. In the end, a lot of things went horribly wrong, but did not affect
the success of the trip. The car Leanna rented for the one-way drive
east turned out to be far smaller than she thought, and the Steves had
to leave home 80% of the packing supplies they had prepared for the
trip. (By dumb luck, the things they did bring -- tape and bubble wrap
-- were the things in the shortest supply.) It started raining before
the end of the first day and rained continually until the afternoon of
the last day, with the only break in the weather coming on the day we
loaded the stuff out of the house. Pre-arranged helpers backed out at
the last minute, but were quickly replaced from Jean's expansive circle
of friends. In the end, luck was with us, and the ex-boyfriend did not
even suspect what was going on until we were out of state, and somehow
Jean and Steve P managed to drive 26 hours (22 of them in two days)
without falling asleep or having an accident. I strongly suspect that
angels were watching out for all three of us.

About Me

Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. is a game-publishing company that creates and publishes games based on the Original Series of Star Trek. We have a contract with Paramount Pictures to do so. Posts and blogs that are not directly related to gaming are the opinions of the individuals who write them, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.